Sadly, this will not be an entertaining post on how I scammed the scammers like James Veitch. This will hopefully serve to be an informational post for other folks who are contemplating the services of “kickstarter marketing experts” and how not to fall prey to such unscrupulous bad actors.
This being our first Kickstarter project, we are quite excited to be able to launch it and receive positive feedback (ok maybe lukewarm might be the more appropriate word) from friends and family. Of course, we would like to see if it succeed and receiving any notification about the project is always exciting.
My first message:
And not too shabby, Mary actually pledged $2 without rewards. (I mean that has to be some sincerity right there!)
But it’s always best to err on the side of caution. So of course, always a good sign to consult the all knowing oracle Google. Some combination of names and website as the search string later this was the result:
Over the course of the next few days, I received a few more similar messages:
The one that was slightly better hidden was from Olivia and William. For this the name and website name were too generic for Google to provide any interesting results (good reverse SEO to obscure their actual identity)
So looking at the whois, the company is a very non dubious entity called:
Super Privacy Service LTD c/o Dynadot
And it’s pretty cool the information you can find on anyone and anything if you know where to go and have a little bit of time (and no you do not need to set up Tor and crawl the darkweb. Normal legal web sleuthing is good enough for most cases)
Did a quick search on my favourite global company entity search tool opencoporate (I think they have all countries entities except possibly North Korea):
Just going through the company records, it just smells extremely fishy 🐟:
Incorporated with USD1 and terminated and appointed the same director
The correspondence address also seems to be shared with multiple companies if you perform a quick google search
So yes, it’s like it’s a shared/ virtual office space. Which is common for startups. But also for scammers.
So lessons
- Do your due diligence before paying someone to advertise to a bot army. There’s no need for more spam in the world
- Kickstarter actually has an experts page you can refer to: https://www.kickstarter.com/experts
- The scammish services tend to have a seamless checkout experience and crappy SEO (interesting combination)
- The legit services on the other are the reverse. Pricing is normally not listed and it is dependent on scope of work after a discussion
Well stay safe folks! And if others out there who have read this have other suggestions please drop me a comment. If you have a great marketing campaign group/ person we would like to get in touch with them as well (yes Im aware we should have done this pre campaign, but I guess we all learn 😊)
For folks interested in supporting our children’s book about computer vision do check out the campaign and help us spread the word http://kck.st/2VQTbFk
